Marius cursed and jammed a mic stand between the crash bars of the TV studio door. “If SWAT’s on its way, we don’t have much time,” he said.

“I don’t understand.” Michaela, who up until a couple of minutes ago had been streaming their interview live, still sat on one of the oval chairs under the hot lights. “What are they talking about?”

The cube-shaped television studio had black-painted walls surrounding the bright stage area. Big monitors on the walls were showing the same “live” feed as they had five minutes ago, but now a red banner flashed at the bottom of the screens: ACTIVE SHOOTER AT COMPLETE PICTURES BUILDING.

Michaela pointed at a moving figure on the screen. “That looks like you—but—”

Marius nodded. “Uh-huh. Apparently I like assault rifles.”

Adan, their cameraman, had called up a local news feed after the first shouts of panic and confusion filtered through the studio’s thick doors. What it showed was entirely and completely not what the three of them were seeing. Marius was inside the windowless second-floor studio, empty-handed, yet the monitors showed what looked like a drone feed of him moving into and out of view through the building’s windows on the 10th floor. He was armed, and every now and then he would pause and shoot, calmly and methodically.

Marius shook his head in disgust. “Hey, Adan, could you give me a hand with this?”

The cameraman was hunched over his laptop. “Sorry, gotta figure out who’s hijacked our signal.”

“The same people who own the SWAT team,” said Marius. “But forget what I said. I think you’d better get out of here.”

“Why?”

“Look.” Marius pointed at the monitors. They were showing a jumble of witness cell-phone videos. “There!” A jiggly shot showed a man lying in a corridor, dead eyes staring upward, a dark stain on his chest.

“But …” Adan gaped. “That’s me.”

“Yes. This scene’s not real yet. Listen, Adan, I mean it: you need to leave. The SWAT team’s not on their way here to save any of us. They’re here to make sure that what’s up there”— he pointed—“matches what’s down here.”

“And soon, the antinet. Michaela, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew they might be watching. Figured they’d be mad if I revealed it, but I never imagined they’d do this.” With the door at least somewhat secure, he went to join Adan at the mixing console. “Any luck?”

The earlier pieces were Factfullness by Hans Rosling I posted months ago on another interesting thread, and about Joel Shepherd on another. Follow the threads back and you will see that they build on the same theme.

Back in 1981, Michael Crichton made a movie called “Looker”, about a company using real-time computer image processing to manipulate televised political debates.

Back in 1967, Vernor Vinge wrote a short story called “The Accomplice” about a company that moved from being a supercomputer manufacturer to a movie studio, making entire movies via photorealistic computer graphics.

“barely extended”? – No, “swatting” is barely related. This piece concerns sending a set of murderers to a location with orders to kill all people at the scene who were shown dead on a synthesized video broadcast. That’s different from calling police with a false report of an emergency.

Yeah, the main difference is that in the story, the SWAT team is clearly complicit and intending to murder people they know to be innocent, whereas swatting involves the illegal misuse of a SWAT team, where the SWAT team is acting in good faith against what they believe to be a credible threat and acting as they would against any credible threat. That’s not a small distinction.

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